asp.net

One of the companies I work for recently took over a project from another vendor. As we started to maintain the site, we noticed that we could not drag and drop controls onto the page and get any more than a stub of the control. <asp:hyperlink runat=”server”></hyperlink> is ALL we got when we dropped the hyperlink control onto the designer.

In fact, every ASPX control on the page displayed the error, “Unrecognized tag prefix or device filter ‘asp.’”

What’s up with that?

Thinking that there must be something wrong with our development environment, or at least something wrong with how we have the project configured, I started my search on Google.

Last night, one of my clients assigned me a problem that I thought was going to require one solution, and in the end it was just poor programming. But the process reminded me of the need for good debugging skills. Just how do you know where the performance problem is?

Well, I learned something a couple of days ago and in the process also found an "Undocumented Feature" in ASP.NET 2.0

First, I learned that you can nest an asp:TextBox inside an asp:Label control and if you then set the associatedcontrolid attribute of the Label control to the id of the TextBox control, the label will render as a label element instead of a span element. Both are pretty cool and both are not very well known.

By now, most people are familiar with the fact that ASP.NET will send mail from the codebehind by simply adding a few lines to your web.config file and adding another few lines of code in the codebehind file.

But it wasn’t until recently that I found that you don’t need to have access to an SMTP server to test your code.

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out that you could easily find the definition of a property, method, variable, or class by right-clicking the item and selecting, “Go To Definition” from the context menu.

You can also use this feature in your ASPX files to find the definition of CSS classes. However, you cannot use this to find definitions of rules. And if the class is not defined, you will not see the menu option and you’ll get a green squiggly under the class and the tooltip will tell you that the class is not defined.